After
by frazzledsoul
Summary: Jon and Tormund ride beyond the wall and seek the future that they deserve. Written for Jonmund Week 2019.


Summer finally bloomed beyond the wall five years after Jon Snow had crossed it for the last time.

Sometimes it seemed to him that everything before those five years was nothing more than a half-remembered dream. He had braced for his departure for the wall half-hopeful: at least this grand march towards kingship, the burden of unwanted responsibilities, the dread in his chest as he wondered if he would survive to the end of the latest war was over. It wasn't until Arya tearfully told him that she was departing on her own journey that he realized how _over_ it was.

Dany dead by his hand, his reputation in ruins, his honor tossed to the wolves he wasn't fit to wander among. His kingship, his family, his home gone. He figured it was the least that he deserved.

It wasn't until he saw Tormund waiting for him at the Wall that he began to realize that life had other plans for him. The bond that had forged between them throughout all of the wars, the death, the agonies, the failures couldn't be broken. It had rooted there in both of them long ago. Even after everything else had been shattered to bits, it stayed with them.

Jon rode beyond the wall with Ghost and the rest of the Free Folk a week later. The Nights Watch let them go and shut the gates behind them, and Jon immediately understood that he was released from those vows that he never quite got around to taking again. It was over this time for good, but there was little despair in the edict this time. He was starting over.

He had shredded his Crow garb and adorned himself with Wilding furs in the first week. The only vestiges that he kept of his old life was Longclaw, clutched to his side for purely practical purposes.

Tormund had his daughters with him – Alsi and Magritte, aged nine and seven respectively – and as Jon traveled with him he was surprised to see this side of Tormund come to the forefront. He'd known Tormund primarily as a friend, a comrade, his wildest drinking partner, a warrior, and in the end the only person who had remained loyal to him. Beyond the wall, Tormund was a leader and a family man, exhibiting a softness and a tenderness that Jon had only glimpsed in private moments between the two of them. He had known Alsi and Magritte were staying with the Free Folk camped at Winterfell, but he had never had enough spare time to know them as individuals.

Alsi had her father's blue eyes and her mother's chestnut hair; she had inherited her father's penchant for mischief, but she was far quieter and more cautious than either her father or her sister. Her mother had died fighting in the battle for Winterfell, and Jon saw the same grief reflected in her eyes that was exhibited on so many of the other Free Folk. Magritte was her father's spitting image: wild red hair, dancing blue eyes, and constantly on the hunt for adventure. Her mother had died when she got "on the wrong side of a shadowcat" when Magritte was four, so she had a closer relationship with Tormund than her older sister did, even though Tormund had spent much of the past few years fighting by Jon's side as they fought battle after battle against the dead.

The girls were capable fighters and hunters, and often accompanied Tormund and Jon on their hunts to collect enough game to feed the camp. They walked for months before deciding to settle next to Antler River, at least for the next few years. Jon and Tormund settled into the motions of ensuring survival for the people under their care: hunting game, assembling furs, erecting cabins, settling disputes between the Free Folk, and caring for the girls.

No one dared to call them Kings Beyond the Wall. There were no enemies to fight anymore, no need for titles in a society that shunned and scorned them. But they had fallen into the role of leaders because they had chosen it, and the people that stayed with them had chosen them. Unlike before, it wasn't something that was forced on Jon, chaining him to responsibilities that he hadn't earned and didn't want. He helped lead the Free Folk because he desired to, because they were his people and he belonged with them. He wanted to keep them safe, as much he had wanted that for Tormund and for his daughters.

They were his family now.

The relationship between him and Tormund evolved slowly, as the anguish and guilt and grief of the past slowly faded away. The nightmares turned to embraces, the embraces turned to kisses, the furs laid side by side in the tent became a single cocoon of passion and comfort, and it seemed . . . natural. And right.

Jon had not even thought of laying with men before, but his life had gone far beyond rigid expectations and codes and vows. All of that was beyond him now, and the society that had accepted him had no patience for it. Tormund loved him unconditionally, and he loved him the same way.

I am yours and you are mine.

Once you had said those words often enough, your destiny had been rooted into bone and blood as permanently as any marriage vow.

Two years after they had ridden beyond the wall, Jon and Tormund were presented with an additional gift to cement their bond: a foundling daughter, three years of age, orphaned by a mother who had died of illness a year beforehand and a father who had been felled by wights during The Long Night. Tormund reasoned that she had adopted them more than the other way around, cozying up to Jon and Alsi while he told her stories of the people that he had known in his former life.

Jon and Tormund named her Ana, a reminder of the mother Jon had never known. He had known love and acceptance through the sacrifices made by his father, his adoption into a family that ensured his safety, but that acceptance was always conditional. He had never been able to escape being an outsider in that other world, but in this one he didn't matter. They were all outsiders, and they had found a home with each other.

One afternoon in the year that summer bloomed again, Jon sat on the hillside outside his home with tow of his daughters, watching while Ana braided wildflowers into Alsi's hair and repeated a story that Jon had told her: this one featured Arya and Rickon, an old tale of hiding in the forest acting out their own version of dragon-riding legends while Ned and Catelyn frantically searched the grounds for them.

There was a time when recounting such stories would have brought Jon nothing but pain, but that time was long behind him. The Free Folk lived in the present, not the past. The intervening years and the family that Jon had collected had healed all of those old wounds, and the ghosts of those old agonies had lost since lost their ability to threaten the peace he had won.

Tormund and Magritte emerged over the side of the hill with Ghost covered in mud from head to toe, clutching freshly killed hares. Magritte's eyes flashed in triumph as she boasted to her sisters about her fresh kill, the sun haloing behind her as her fathers embraced beside their new bounty.

Peace had become a permanent condition, and it was unlikely to be threatened by any of the old enemies for the foreseeable future.


End file.
